to tremble with dread: to be seized by sudden, body-shaking fear
This is fear you feel in the body before you can think: a shudder, a jolt, the tremor that runs through you when danger strikes or the holy comes near. It is not the calm, settled respect that English Bibles call the fear of the LORD (that steady reverence belongs to a different Hebrew word). This word names the involuntary shaking itself, which is why it lives mostly in poetry, prophecy, and the book of Job, where the physical shock of terror carries its full weight.
Most often the trembling is plain terror: dread of an advancing enemy, of sudden disaster, of a threat in the dark. But the same shudder can be aimed at God. Standing before his holiness or his word, a person quakes, and that is awe with the body in it, not mere politeness.
Most striking is where the word turns hopeful. In several later prophets the very trembling that once meant terror becomes the tremor of people drawn toward God and overwhelmed by his goodness, so that the heart shakes and swells with something close to joy. One word thus stretches from raw panic to awe to a trembling gladness, always with the body caught up in it.
Nuances
Disputed
Whether the root's core sense is the body's involuntary trembling, with the emotion of dread derived from it, or the emotion of dread and awe, with any physical trembling secondary.
- majorityThe core is physical shuddering; the emotion of dread is derived from the bodily tremor.; HALOT, s.v. פחד I; DCH, s.v. פחד I; H.-P. Mueller, "פחד paḥad," TDOT XI (Eerdmans 2001), 517-526; H. P. Staehli, "פחד," TLOT 2 (Hendrickson 1997)
- minorityThe core is the emotion of dread and awe, with any bodily trembling secondary.; BDB, s.v. פחד; NIDOTTE (Zondervan 1997), vol. 3